


Undyne defends Devil's Reef

by morefishplease



Series: Comfy Fish Stories [51]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Lovecraftian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 03:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10868214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morefishplease/pseuds/morefishplease
Summary: What it says in the title. Due to having originally been written and posted for a different site most of my stories' titles are just descriptions of the story, and I'm too lazy to make up meaningful titles for everything.





	Undyne defends Devil's Reef

Undyne is saying something but you’re not paying attention; your eyes are fixed firmly on her cheeks, her mouth, fanged and aquiline and beautiful, golden-flecked fisheyes flashing as she notes you aren’t listening to a word she’s saying. She reaches out and lays a powerful claw along your arm and your words arrest themselves somewhere in your throat.

“What is it?” she says and you shrug, itch at your tattoo, which hasn’t yet stopped hurting.

“Do you ever think – “ you begin, then shake your head. “No, it’s nothing.”

“Come on,” she says, inching closer to you. Off in the distance you can hear the water dripping into the darkened underground sea, you can hear the waves pressing against the midnight-black jetty. There is the sound of nictating fins cutting the water. Undyne is very warm and sweet-smelling but this close the cracks start to show; her eyes are slit like a cat’s, and when she blinks a thin film skirts over them first, cleaning them of debris, then her thick armored lids close. You have seen her paw at the vision-ruining scar once or twice but you haven’t dared ask her about it. You have seen her angry and been frightened; you have seen the barnacle-crusted trident she hefts with a burly flick of her titan arm disembowel an irksome male of her species, send his parts skittering across the rock into the sea, fall beneath inky sheen of spilled blood. You have felt her hydraulic heartbeat sending her blood in a scurrying roundabout, filling her veins with a constant pressure. Her skin is cool and warm and sweet but when she looks at you you see blood and brain and tissue and can only whisk along with her like angler-fish’s groom, knowing that you have been caught and kept by something oh! so stronger than you.

“What is it, sprat?” Undyne rumbles and you swallow, kiss her arm. She grins a lazy grin at you and you can see yourself reflected in the shine of her teeth. Her lantern flicks off and she stows it away, tucked back against her head, and for a moment you cannot see at all, nothing except for the quadruple lights of her eyes, glowing with their own faint luminescence.

“Do you ever think we’re the bad guys?” you ask, and you feel her rumble, somewhere deep in her chest. Her gills swell as she breathes deep, ruminates. You look at her, reach up, run a hand through her long fibrous hair. Your arm has changed, you note; it is getting longer, spindlier. She looks at you sometimes with something similar to love in her large, strange eyes, nuzzles her noseless face into your chest, arms, legs, buries you in rough kisses. “Soon you will be perfect,” she always says. You rub the side of your neck, feel the blooming protrusions that Undyne says will soon burst forth into flowery pink gills. Soon you will not be able to breathe air at all.

“Sometimes –“ Undyne begins, but there is a small, furtive noise outside the door and Undyne glances at you with half her eyes, leaves the rest fixed. She motions to you in battle-cant and you get the shield, a hulking slab of metal light as aluminum, made of the same strange alloy her kind makes their jewelry from. She lays a hand on your back, squeezes lightly. This is meant to reassure you but you can still feel a tight knot of fear in your stomach. You try and try to stomp it down whenever this happens but it bulges back like a worm  writhing in your gut. You nod to Undyne, lock the shield in place, and she raises the trident overhand, poised to stab over the shield, head hunkered, back hunched, almost cowering behind you, but you know her knotty, scarred legs are poised and if need be she will leap over you, bucking and braying as well as any horse, ready to bite and claw and scrape and feed. The last time, a bright tide of foamy warm gore seeped beneath the shield as you hid behind it, listening to the screams and the joyous ultrasonic whine Undyne makes while she fights and you pray this time it may not be so bloody.

“YA VULGTLAGLN Y’GNAIIH DAGON, NNN’Y’ORR’E SYHA’H!” Undyne booms, the sound pitched above the door’s creaking as the men press in, shout, scream at the sight of her. Her trident thrusts forward and you, looking up, see her face contorted into a rictus of a smile as she intones a loud ululating call of “Y’HAH, Y’HAAH, Y’HAAAH” over and over again between her thrusts. There is gunfire and the patter of small impacts against your shield and the men are speaking to each other –

“A deep one!”

“Run! Don’t risk it – aah!”

“It got Jones! Damn – shoot the damn thing!”

As the words blend together with Undyne’s head-wrenching prayers and the wet crunch as her trident finds purchase again and again, you can see behind her one of the small weak males has popped its head above the water and is peering nervously toward the door. You motion for it to swim down below, to dive deep, and it disappears, and as you brace the shield further with your back you realize you are crying. There are only small weak moans coming from the men now, they have all died or fled and left their wounded, and Undyne gets up, grins fearlessly, brilliantly at you, goes around the shield and out of sight.

You can hear wet crunches and snapping of bones and the screams start again. You huddle into yourself and recite the litany against fear Undyne taught you but it isn’t seeming to do anything. You wince as Undyne growls, mouth full, wet sloppy noises, and you can hear a man moaning weakly, somewhere ahead, but you dare not look; you will only find him batting weakly at her as she worries the long strings of intestines from his ruined belly. You wipe the saltwater from your eyes, focus on the litany: THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE, AND WITH STRANGE EONS EVEN DEATH MAY DIE. Your breathing calms as you repeat it to yourself, tune out the carnage.

You watch Undyne’s tail flick in simple animal pleasure as she fills her belly and you wonder if she truly cannot die.

**Author's Note:**

> This one was pretty fun. IIRC the request was something like 'write an Undyne story in the universe of your favorite author' or something like that. I wouldn't say Lovecraft is necessarily my absolute favorite author but I liked him enough to write my senior thesis on him and I'm very familiar with his stuff. This was a nice way to see how far I could stretch the character and still make it identifiably Undyne; I'm not sure I really succeeded, I don't think I kept enough of her personality the same, you could swap some names around and it'd make just as much sense.
> 
> On the other hand, in and of itself, I do like this story. I like the whole reverse shieldmaiden thing I did toward the end and I think overall it's pretty decent. The one little niggle I have is that I absolutely cannot come up with good Cthuvian on my own or whatever, I can't make it sound good at all, so I used that one dumb dictionary you find on google if you look it up and it just looks stupid in this, but I don't think there's a good way to win there, it'd be dumb either way.


End file.
